In the society of today there are many situations where it would be advantageous to be able to reproduce details from a certain activity or area.
There is often a need to produce substantiated evidence of what actually happened in a certain location of a criminal activity to be able to tie a criminal to the act. However, people tend to be more reluctant to intervene or even witness against crimes committed or about to happen, out of fear of getting involved. There is also always the risk that an individual that have committed a criminal act, even if convicted, will retaliate after sentence is served. Witness protection programs are known to have flawed and very few are prepared to live with hidden identities. A technical replacement of a witness is a surveillance camera. Surveillance cameras are important instruments for deterrence and detection of crime, as well as in prosecution and conviction of criminal acts.
For legal reasons, however, the use of surveillance cameras is restricted. One reason for this is a conflicting requirement of personal integrity, wherein a ruling opinion among people in general is that they want to be able to move in public places, without being observed and recorded. As an example, surveillance cameras may be allowed on underground trains but not in waiting halls or streets in general. As a result, individuals with a criminal intention can easily avoid monitored areas, and in absence of means to produce substantiated evidence, they can continue with their criminal activity, since, the likelihood of getting punished is low. In addition, surveillance cameras are expensive solutions, especially if a large area is to be covered.
An alternative to the use of surveillance cameras is to rely on recordings made by individuals on site. While law enforcement employees may be prepared to take photos or to record a criminal activity on film, private persons may be reluctant to do that, since this type of activities may involve a risk of becoming the next target, either personally or the recording equipment.
For the same reason, people may defer from calling 911 in order to alert law enforcement personnel, since that will involve leaving personal details and location, as well as describing the situation. The alerting person in question may get the feeling that intervening involves a too high personal risk. Also considering the time for law enforcement to arrive to the crime scene, the person giving the report may be asked to remain in the area for further questioning. In addition, the person making the alarm call is likely to feel responsible for summoning the law enforcement and may therefore hesitate to such involvement in doubtful situations. Once the law enforcement arrives, there may also be considerable problems of providing evidence of what has actually happened on a crime scene. In short, there is presently little technical support to encourage law abiding citizens to assist in emergency or law violation situations.
Public alarm services, such as, e.g. dialing 911, are well known but suffer from the same limitations as presented previously.
Real-time, over-the-air media delivery services with a central network sender and peripheral receivers, e.g., TV broadcast to mobile phones, are also well known. The use of peripheral senders are less common but do occur, e.g. in health care scenarios where personal health information is sent to medical personnel over mobile networks. Health service, however, is a special service typically provided for certain individuals only. In addition, it has to be personalized and preconfigured before it can be used.
DRM normally represents a mechanism for controlling access to, and usage of, digital data, such as, e.g., software, music, movies or hardware, which may be implemented with any of several available technologies. A DRM mechanism may be used by content providers, publishers or copyright owners wanting to apply usage restrictions associated with a specific instance of a digital work. DRM extends beyond the physical delivery of content, offered by a provider, into managing a part of, or the complete content lifecycle. DRM is a vast area which may involve many different components, including asset management, such as, e.g. packaging, identification, encryption, watermarking and tracking, rights management, such as, e.g. rights creation, association to content, licensing, and other areas, such as, e.g. trading and payments. A deployment of a DRM system, with end-users, possessing rights to access or use the digital data on their own equipment, typically involves technical protection measures to prevent end-users from exceeding the access or usage rights, such as, e.g. cryptography, tamper resistant HW, software security etc. Cryptography is typically invoked when encrypting or integrity protecting the data during transport as well as, together with identification schemes, to ensure that the right content and license are used on a legitimate user equipment. HW support, such as tamper resistant DRM modules, is part of the legitimate user equipment to secure the identification of the user equipment, and together with software obfuscation, to secure the implementation of the DRM system.
A common implementation of a DRM system is the logical separation of content and associated rights. This enables the same content to be used for different sets of rights and a rights trading business model, where a Rights Issuer (RI) can package and sell or offer Rights Objects (RO) to particular data content for a specific legitimate user equipment or group of user equipments. More information of how to use DRM as described above can be retrieved from “DRM Architecture, Open Mobile Alliance, Approved version 2.0—3 Mar. 2006”.
In particular, a weak point of any DRM system is the protection of DRM content forwarded to a user equipment, such as, e.g. a music/movie player or parser, where the data eventually must be available in clear text format to be able to be used. Various schemes for protecting DRM content, and especially for setting up a Security Association between the content provider and the user equipment, such as, e.g. the OMA DRM Rights Object Acquisition Protocol (ROAP), are known. OMA DRM ROAP is an authentication protocol that also transports the digital rights associated to a particular digital media, together with cryptographic keys to be used for decrypting the content and verifying the integrity of the rights.
Another field where it might be of interest to secure evidence of an activity is when two or more parties are to sign an agreement with each other. There are many situations where negotiating parties having made an agreement with each other may end up in a dispute over the binding force of the agreement. Digital declarations, used in the signing of an agreement may offer a more reliable way of legally verifying an agreement. One method for using such a digital declaration when signing an agreement is known from the patent application US 2004/0139344. This patent application describes a method to be used in order to strengthen the binding force of a digital declaration of an agreement, wherein characteristics, associated with a document, and digital recording information, associated with one or more signing parties are combined and stored for later retrieval. The method described in US 2004/0139344 includes the recording of an action, statement or capacity of an individual, made at the time of the declaration of an agreement made with a document. A link, linking the recorded content with characteristics from the document is Carried out by, e.g., a computer at the location of the individual. By storing the linked information, it is possible to retrieve the information at a later occasion, in order to verify that the agreement was correctly made by the participating individuals.
There are, however, deficiencies associated also with this application. Initially, the security of the recorded content can be questioned, both when considering the risk for tampering with a recording, as well as when considering the security of stored content, and the ability to keep the content out of reach for unauthorized individuals.
In addition, the procedure necessary for synchronizing a number of activities, involving a plurality of recording entities, may be complex, wherein a malfunction, or erroneous management at one step may jeopardize the binding force of the signing procedure, and the expected value of the proof of the recorded material.